Who invented the airplane?

Starkey

Starkey

Avenging Rooster
The year is 2003AC. The world is entirely celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight. Well, not entirely... One small land of indomitable Brazilians still holds out against the rest of the world.

Ask any Brazilian on the street who invented the airplane and they´ll say: Alberto Santos-Dumont, a 5´4" Brazilian who moved to France in 1891 and, with the inheritance advanced from his father, began building flying machines.

It was on November 12, 1906, when Santos-Dumont flew a kite-like contraption with boxy wings called the 14-Bis some 722 feet (220 meters) on the outskirts of Paris, an event witnessed by hundreds of people, including the French press and aviation specialists. It being the first public flight in the world, he was hailed as the inventor of the airplane all over Europe.

Only later the secretive Wright Brothers revealed to the world that they had been flying for the past 3 years. Among many points raised against the Wright´s flight, two are considered the most important by those who defend Santos-Dumont as the first to fly: the Wrights didn´t make public flights until 1908, and there are reports of witnesses and scientific evidence of the previous flights which points that they flew only gliders until then. The second point is that the Wrights´s Flyer had to be launched from a pillar (catapult), and couldn´t take off on its own and neither could sustain itself in the air without strong tail winds, as you could see yesterday in the failed attempt of re-creating the Flyer´s flight.

This site has most of pro-Santos facts, if anyone is interested.
 
The local legend around Connecticut is Igor Sikorski who people argue flew before the Wright brothers. I don't know the full story so who cares?
 
Eh, I think it's a bi-product of this sort of discovery - when you have hundreds and hundreds of people worldwide working towards the same goal (as you did around the turn of the century with flight), you're going to end up with lots of claims of "we really did it first!"
 
I agree, LOAF. Besides the Wright Brothers, Dumont and Sikorski, there´s a German who is also said to have flown first. But I think all of them deserve praise, since each one contributed greatly to the development of the airplane.
 
Everybody thinks the Wright brothers made the first powered flight, ergo, they invented the airplane. If I invent the wheel before that other guy who invented the wheel, and nobody ever finds out, well too bad for me. Just my personal philosophy on these quibbles about who invented what first... the majority is always right.
 
Not everyone, Geebot, at least not outside the U.S. As I said, all Brazilians think Santos Dumont invented the airplane.

And it goes the opposite way of what you said: It was Dumont who made a public flight before the Wrights, it was only 2 years after Dumont´s first flight that the Wrights made a public flight of their Flyer.

Dumont supporters say that "what would Edison, Graham Bell or Marconi say if, after they had presented in public the electric lamp, the telephone or wireless telegraph, some other inventor came on the scene with an electric lamp, telephone or wireless telegraph apparatus, saying that he had invented them before they did?"

I know the Wrights wanted to protect their patents, but if you had invented the airplane wouldn´t you immediately call the whole world to see it? The Wright Brothers had patented only a glider circa 1908, and until then they had only some pictures and a few witnesses to prove that they flew first. Dumont, on the other hand, called the French authorities and scientific community to witness his first flight, which was filmed and watched by hundreds, in downtown Paris. I´m not saying the Wright Brothers´s evidence doesn´t count, but I think it is not enough to prove, without doubt, that they flew a powered aircraft first.
 
GeeBot said:
Everybody thinks the Wright brothers made the first powered flight, ergo, they invented the airplane.
Click to expand...

You forget the fact that they made no public announcement of their flight until a full year later.
 
Or Christopher Colombus, who was said to be the first European to discover America, was previously denied the fame because of the Italian Amerigo Vespuci (if I spelt the name right)...

... and then it is conjenctural fact that the Vikings came much earlier than them.
 
Starkey said:
Dumont supporters say that "what would Edison, Graham Bell or Marconi say if, after they had presented in public the electric lamp, the telephone or wireless telegraph, some other inventor came on the scene with an electric lamp, telephone or wireless telegraph apparatus, saying that he had invented them before they did?"
Click to expand...
Actually, while I don't know so much about the history of the telephone (I don't know about who claimed to have invented it first, although I'm sure there'll probably be someone), both the electric lamp and the radio were not, in fact, invented first by Edison and Marconi, respectively. (In fact, Marconi lost a court case over key radio patents.) What they did was commercialize their invention, develop the business infrastructure--in short, they made it practical. I suppose you could put it this way: If you haven't made your invention useful, you haven't finished inventing it. Same with the Vikings. They may have been the first Europeans to visit the New World, but their discoveries didn't lead to a European invasion of the Americas. (Incidentally, by definition, I don't think a conjecture can be a fact.)

LeHah said:
You forget the fact that they made no public announcement of their flight until a full year later.
Click to expand...
Never said they did (although I think they did release a press release almost immediately). The Wright brothers kept their flights fairly secret, but well-documented, with photographs and a number of witnesses. I don't think that's all that important, though, because the real impact of that first flight came later, when the Wrights had refined their machine to the point where they could demonstrate it to astonished crowds, and their legal defenses were solid.

Another example: Germans invented the first gasoline engine, and I think the first automobile with an internal combustion engine, but Henry Ford gets the credit for mass producing the things. The helicopter and the liquid-fueled rocket are similar stories.

Anyway, the main reason why I consider practical successes to be more important than quibbles about who did what first is precisely because of debates like these. I don't give a cat's (Kilrathi's?) whisker about whether some guy here or there flew first. If you want to postulate about the existence of aliens, they probably invented the airplane billions of years ago. The important question is, why should we, as human beings, care?

Final comment: The principles behind gliders were well understood by everyone trying to achieve powered flight. In fact, if you think about the Wright brothers' achievement purely in terms of slapping an engine on a glider, it's not really an airplane. However, the Wrights put together a real airplane, a heavier-than-air vehicle that was self-propelled and could be controlled. The Wright patent didn't need to include an engine, because the key to their airplane was the three axis control system (which is used in all airplanes, even to this day). It may have just been a fancy glider, but nobody could build a practical airplane (at least in the US, I guess) without the patent, which was successfully defended in court many times.
 
Speaking of Italians...the plane (and Copter) both go to DaVinci...he obviously didn't make a powered flight, but he actually developed both aircraft...it is unfortunate that the additional technology he required (namely the Internal Combustion Engine).

Bonkus Maximus

O.K....my argument is biased...I am part Italian
 
You're all wrong. For you see, I invented the first aircraft. When I turn 75 I cryogenically freeze myself and awaken in 6969 and buy a time machine and... okay okay so I didn't invent it. :p
 
There's also a New Zealander who claimed to have been flying 1KM controllably around May 1903... started flying it in 1902.
 
The silly thing is that any claim any of us make now is going to be based primarily on some silly sense of national pride (the Americans think it was an American, the Brazilians think it was a Brazilian, etc.) rather than any sort of fact.
 
I believe the question was "Who invented the first airplane." This being the case, the person who said DaVinci is correct. DaVinci invented the airplane...but he could not create a functioning one (because of the lack of a powerful enough propulsion system). If you want to to ask "Who made the first powered flight" well...that's different then. But, that was not the question asked. So, the answer is DaVinci.

EDIT: and I'm not Italian. I'm a Chinese-American living in Washington. So, I don't think I'm biased in saying that it was DaVinci.
 
From a technical standpoint, given all the requisites that were established at the time, Santos Dummont was the first to make a public, verified flight that met all the standards. That is a fact.

However, the whole "Inventor of the Airplane" thing can be a major discussion. I used to like to debate this, but I don't find it fun anymore. LOAF has a point, you know? People will argue more due to national pride than anything else. If the situations were reversed, Americans would argue that formality is all that matters and the Brazilians would say they are not important.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top